Bruce affected nonchalance. “Actually, I bought three cases for that new business of mine. I thought that Edinburgh being the sort of place that it is, there might be demand for it. There are a lot of wealthy people who live here, you know – people who will be prepared to fork out for this sort of stuff.”
“Oh, I know that,” said Will. He peered at the bottle on its shelf. “Would you mind if I took a look?”
“Of course not,” said Bruce. “In fact, how about a glass?”
Will raised an eyebrow. “That’s very generous of you,” he said. “I wasn’t . . .”
“Of course not,” said Bruce, rising to his feet. “I’ve been looking forward to trying it myself and who better to share it with?”
He crossed the room to take the bottle from the shelf. Then he handed it to Will, who examined it closely.
“Lovely year,” said Will. “I take it that you know that this is pretty valuable?” He hesitated. “I suppose that you must know that, if you bought three cases of it.”
Bruce was not giving anything away. “Yes,” he said, smiling.
“This wine isn’t cheap, by any means. But what’s the use of having the stuff if you aren’t prepared to have the occasional glass?”
He reached for a corkscrew and passed it to Will. “Care to do the honours?”
Will carefully exposed the cork and looked at the top of it.
Then, as Bruce fetched the glasses from the cupboard, Will gently twisted the screw into the cork and drew it up the neck of the bottle. It emerged with a satisfactory pop and he immediately sniffed at it and smiled.
“So far, so good,” he said. “Now if you pass me the glasses, we’ll see what we have here.”
Bruce’s expression was anxious as he passed over the glasses.
This, he thought bitterly, is the moment of humiliation – the crowning humiliation, in fact, coming on top of everything that had gone wrong for him in recent months – that business over 294
He watched in fascination as Will took a sip of the wine and moved it about his mouth, drawing in air through the lips.
Nervously, he raised his own glass and sipped at the wine. It tasted all right to him – rather good, in fact – but then, in a rare moment of honesty, he said to himself: what do I know about this?
Will looked at Bruce. “What a stunner!” he said.
Bruce looked startled. “Stunner?”
“A beautiful wine,” went on Will. “So supple and ripe – yet it has elegance and length. One can understand why this is seen as such a great wine. One really can.”
Afterwards, when Will had left the flat, Bruce went into the bathroom and looked at himself in the mirror. His face was lit with triumph, and in his ears rang Will’s parting words. His visitor had explained that he thought there would be no trouble in entering the remaining wine, now reduced to thirty-five bottles, but still a very impressive quantity, in the wine auction that was due to take place in a few days’ time. And then he had said: “And I suspect that you’ll clear at least thirty thousand for the lot, once commissions are taken.”
Bruce looked back into the mirror and smiled at himself.
“You’re a stunner yourself,” he said in self-compliment. “A human Chateau Petrus!”
more junior civil servants, whose confidence generally exceeded that of their superiors. Indeed, greater self- assertiveness in the higher echelons of the Executive was thought to be the only way in which policies could be implemented in the face of opposition from below. And in due course, it had been announced, ministers themselves would receive self-assertiveness training to assist them to assert unpopular policies in the face of widespread public opposition and thereby to force their acceptance. (This is not to say that these policies were bad. Indeed, many of them were good; it’s just that the public cannot always be trusted to recognise a good policy when they see it.) Stuart had signed up for a personal assertiveness workshop that would require him to spend two hours alone in the company of an assertiveness counsellor. He was looking forward to this, as he had gradually been reaching the conclusion that whatever level of assertiveness he managed to achieve in his working environment, this was far from adequate at home. In particular, he had concluded that if he was to do anything about his relationship with his son, Bertie, then he would need to stand up to Irene.
And that was an alarming thought. It was all very well to have scored a minor victory with Bertie’s attendance at Tofu’s bowling party, but it would be quite another thing to achieve the goal of getting Bertie out of psychotherapy, of relieving him of the need to attend yoga lessons in Stockbridge, and to dismantle, as far as possible, the remaining planks of what Irene called the
“Bertie project”. And yet he owed it to his son. He had vowed that he would not let the little boy down: he would restore to him the tiny pleasures and idle moments of a happy boyhood.
He would make his life whole again.
Stuart sat in Meeting Room 64A/3B/4/16 (west) in the offices of the Scottish Executive, awaiting the arrival of the assertiveness counsellor, who was already ten minutes late. Stuart passed the time reading a newspaper, and was immersed in an editorial when the door was opened by a slight man in his early thirties, wearing jeans and an open-neck shirt.
“You’re Stuart Pollock?” asked the counsellor, glancing at a clipboard in his hand.
